Sting-Ray Afternoons

Mom was in tears but Dad howled. “He’s still your brother,” he said. “He’ll always be your brother. He’ll come home again.”

But the six-year-old is the first to figure out what the rest of us can’t yet face. Summers aside, Jim won’t come home again. He’ll not leave every morning and return every night, season after season, year after year, as reliable as the rising and the setting of the sun. Our family of seven, our aluminum-sided house “bursting at the seams” (in Mom’s words), will never again be as loud, the kids’ bathroom will never again be as crowded, dinners will never be so chaotic. Grievous errors will go unpunished.

Bloomington seems smaller without him. It literally is, of course, but Jim’s not the only one leaving. The population is in an inevitable decline. No city, not even one called Bloomington, can remain in perpetual bloom. In February, Rod Carew was traded to the California Angels. Last year, the Vikings released Alan Page, who now wears 82 and plays for the Bears. My Vikings jersey with his number on it is now a dust rag, one more implement in Mom’s Endust arsenal. The Purple People Eaters are a memory. Their Super Bowl run is over.

Mary Tyler Moore went off the air two years ago, continuing the Twin Cities diaspora: Rhoda Morgenstern left Minneapolis for New York, Lou Grant took a job in L.A., and Murray Slaughter, in an improbable career move, is now captain of the Love Boat.

But Bloomington remains front-page, bold type, at least for another week. Outside my bedroom window, across the marsh where Eddie O’Phelan and I first spied a naked woman, I can see a twenty-one-story hotel. At the top of it, eight lighted letters spell RADISSON, a sign that glows red at night, fueling my fantasy that I live in a city like J. J. Evans on Good Times.

Next door to the Radisson, invisible behind the marsh, is the low-slung L’Hotel de France, which everyone calls the Hotel Duhfrantz. It is there, in the bar of the Hotel Duhfrantz, on the evening of October 23, 1979, that New York Yankees manager Billy Martin sucker punches a traveling marshmallow salesman from suburban Chicago named Joe Cooper. Bloomington, once again, is a dateline in papers worldwide. The view from my bedroom window is national news. Many of the news bulletins mention Martin’s drinking buddy that night, a “local businessman” named Howard Wong, impresario of Wong’s Chinese restaurant, which is not to be confused with Fong’s Chinese restaurant across town.

Martin is fired by the Yankees’ volatile owner, George Steinbrenner, and to see it all turned into a running gag on The Tonight Show remains a thrill, even if David Letterman and Bill Cosby are guest-hosting for the week.

Johnny’s hardly ever on his own show anymore. Overnight, it seems, Johnny Carson and Jim Rushin have vanished. It isn’t just the decade that’s drawing to a close. Bloomington’s golden age is coming to an end, and childhood is receding. A month before Billy punched the marshmallow salesman, I turned thirteen and received in the mail an envelope from the Hotel, Motel, Restaurant, Bar, and Club Employees Union Local No. 17 of the AFL-CIO. Enclosed was an embossed plastic card identifying me as the newest employee of the Minnesota Twins, employee 1311, eligible to work in the Metropolitan Stadium commissary for the final home stand of the Twins season and all eight Vikings games this fall. It is nepotism, Jim’s gift to me, my first job, in the beating heart of Bloomington, now a decrepit ballpark that has only two years left to live.

No longer a kid, not quite in high school, and newly possessed of a haircut that is no longer modeled on Mr. Spock’s, I stay home on New Year’s Eve to babysit Amy and John while Mom and Dad attend a party. Tom’s at a sleepover. Alone in front of the TV as Dick Clark counts down the final seconds of 1979, I’m seized with a sudden urge to say something out loud to mark the end of the 1970s. And so five seconds before the decade expires, inspired by his enormous Afro and prodigious leaping ability, Dr. J’s name comes out of my mouth. Dr. J is who I now want to be, a man who wears the stars and stripes of Evel Knievel but flies on his own power.

As the ball drops in Times Square, I whisper “Julius” in an empty room.

Then it’s quiet again, save for the celebrations on TV, and Dick Clark’s face reassures me that certain verities shall persist. Some things will never change. And so I fall asleep in the Archie Bunker chair secure in the knowledge that Chic, Blondie, Barry Manilow, the Village People, Bo Duke, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Shortcake from Happy Days will always ring in the next year, and the next decade, as they are doing tonight.

At 1 a.m., the headlamp beams of the Buick Regal light up the family room, the motor drive of the automatic garage door coughs to life, and Mom and Dad walk in, smelling of secondhand smoke. I want to keep my eyes closed, pretend to be asleep, and have Dad carry me to my room, as he did ten years ago, across the threshold of that motel in Wisconsin Dells, when man walked on the moon, life was about to begin in Minnesota, and everything was possible.

But Dad is forty-five and can’t carry his six-foot son upstairs to bed anymore. Nineteen eighty is just an hour old, but childhood is already drawing down.





11.





Goodbye Yellow Brick Road




Two weeks after I graduate from the Buh-vum in June of 1980, out of the clear blue sky, Tom McCarthy’s dad dies of a heart attack. Arriving straight from practice, I attend the wake in my BAA baseball uniform. Mom decides at the door of the funeral home that I should take my cleats off. It’s marginally less hillbilly that way. Mac is sobbing. I’m heartbroken for him but also fearful for myself. Dad is roughly the same age as Mr. McCarthy. I don’t know what to say, but when Mac sees me, stocking-footed, in my clown-colored BAA double knits, he laughs. The laughter doesn’t diminish in any way the sobbing, however. He’s laughing and crying at the same time, and with equal intensity. It took thirteen years, but I now know someone well who has died in real life, and from this point forward death will be as contagious as a yawn.

Steve Rushin's books